Beneath Ceaseless Skies #234

by Michael J. DeLuca

Stag wondered how her jaws would feel around his throat, her body with its coarse fur a furnace against his. God, he wanted her. Back at Brother North Wind’s, Old Tom would write songs about this fight, after none of them was left alive to hear—not Delia, not the Wolf, not Staggerlee. Maybe Evangeline would sing, in a voice terrible as her whiskey.

  Somewhere among the drink and wind and distance and prayer, Stag found it had all come clear. It wasn’t death he wanted, though death would have been no easy thing to come by. No rounder could have done it, no hunter, no big city sheriff. The Wolf could give him death; and death, better even than whiskey or a cold lament or pain, was the ultimate forgetting. But Stag wanted more. What he wanted from the Wolf was love.

  Delia pushed back the hood of her coat, looking from the Wolf to Staggerlee. Then she pulled off her mittens one after the other and dropped them in the bloody mud.

  Her face was still frozen, so he couldn’t read what was there, but then she’d never had much trouble reading his. He’d never before been bothered to care. Now, he regretted.

  Delia raised the scattergun wobbling to the base of the Wolf’s jaw and pulled the trigger.

  Copyright © 2017 Michael J. DeLuca

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Michael J. DeLuca lives in the rapidly suburbifying post-industrial woodlands north of Detroit with his wife, kid, cats, worms, and microbes. He is the editor of Reckoning, a new journal of creative writing on environmental justice. His fiction has appeared most recently in Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Strangelet, and Middle Planet, and at BCS, where he also reads for the occasional podcast. Try him at @michaeljdeluca.

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  CORPUS GRACE

  by William Broom

  1. The Priest

  The priest slept in the saddle, passing in and out of half-remembered dreams. The one-eyed girl sat in front of him, driving the horse on across the steppe. They passed through tiny villages and nomad camps, where the people welcomed them and warned of where soldiers had last been seen. “It is too dangerous for you,” they said to the priest. “Move slowly, and only at night, or you will be caught.” But all the years of hiding were behind him now. It was a long way to the tomb of the saint, and they did not have much time.

  He had lived in secrecy for so long that he had forgotten what it was like to see the open plain in the daylight. When the one-eyed girl had found him, he had been hiding in a ger, squeezed into a stifling gap between the inner and outer walls. The herdsmen who he was visiting had put him there because they thought the approaching rider was an Imperial spy. They shouted at her, “Go away, mountain girl, go! There are no priests here.” But when he heard her say: “I have come from Kou,” he had wriggled out of the secret space and showed himself. Only something very dire could have brought her here to find him, a hundred miles away from the mountains of her home. And because she came from Kou, he had known at once that the saint must be in danger.

  As they traveled, the one-eyed girl said little. When they stopped to rest, she would build the fire, heat the pot, and boil the meat that the herders had given them. She never let the priest do any of the work. The first night, after they had eaten, she took off his boots and washed his feet. He didn’t let her do that again.

  He remembered her from his previous visits to Kou. She was young enough that he had probably blessed her when she was born. But he could not remember how she had gotten the scar. It made a ragged canyon down her face, from her right eye socket to her jaw. By the way she wore it, he guessed she had had it a long time.

  On the third day they passed another herders’ camp: a half-dozen tents clustered around a thin stream that wound across the plain. From this central point, the herds were spread out from horizon to horizon, like the wings of a great bird. Their food and water was not close to running out, so the one-eyed girl rode on without stopping. But before they were out of sight, one of the herds crossed their path, putting an impassable river of sheep and goats in front of them. As soon as the herdsmen recognized the priest, they were eager to speak with him.

  “Please let us welcome you at our camp,” they said. “It has been a long time since we were visited by a priest.”

  The one-eyed girl watched them warily, but the priest was not suspicious. Long ago he had made a choice to trust all the people of the steppe with his life, just as they trusted him with their souls. Still, he did not want to stop.

  “We are in a hurry,” he said, “and there is still far for us to go.”

  The herdsmen did not ask where he was going. Silence ran deep among the steppe tribes, and they trusted that whatever mission he was on was a sacred one. But he could hear the soft plea in their voices.

  “My sister—she had a child only a week ago,” one of them said. “Will the saint give her a blessing?”

  It would be better for the child if he said no. Only a week old and already she was bound for all of this: a life of covert spirituality, of grace bartered in dark corners and scraped together from doctrines written by dead men. Let her be raised in the imperial faith, he thought. Let her forget the doomed religion of her grandmothers. Yet he knew this could not be, for his was the only faith that the steppe-people knew. If they did not have this, they would have nothing.

  “There is no time,” the one-eyed girl murmured to him.

  The winters were harsh on the steppe. Many infants did not live through their first. He might be the only priest the baby ever saw.

  He nodded to the herdsmen. “I will call the saint.”

  As they rode toward the camp, the herdsmen blew on their ram’s-horns and others echoed them across the plain: the saint is coming! The elders of the tribe came out to greet him in their yellow robes and foxskin hats. Bells were rung and sandalwood burned in an iron bowl.

  These were not his rituals but theirs. Before the saints had come to the steppe, these people had worshipped spirits. Saint Theodore—heaven send that he find peace—had counseled his missionaries to leave those old ways intact wherever they were compatible with the scripture. The false idols had been destroyed, but other things remained: the burning of sandalwood, the chants of the storytellers, the cups of mares’ blood and milk. Such things were immaterial to the Divine Mission. The instruments of grace are ten thousand in number, the priest had learned in the seminary—the number ten thousand having stood for the infinite in the ancient texts.

  That was the bargain Saint Theodore had made for the people’s souls. It had made him a schismatic in the eyes of the Canon Church, but it had cemented the faith of the steppe peoples forever. In spite of everything, they remained strong.

  By the time the last shepherd had come in from the plain, the sun had already set. It was time for the calling to begin. One of the elders began to beat a drum. The others sang from their throats, filling the air with deep harmonic tones. The people crowded around in a half-circle, clasping offerings for the saint. The one-eyed girl stood off to the side but watched intently.

  Orienting himself by the stars, the priest knelt down and used two fingers to draw a circle around himself in the dirt. The people pressed forward to lay their gifts on the circle: fruit, vegetables, bonecrafts, and embroidered fabrics. In his youth he would never have allowed such offerings to be made. It far too much resembled the sacrifices they had made to spirits in the time before Saint Theodore came to them. He felt guilty about it, but he no longer had the strength to deny it to them. It gave them comfort; and what was one more heresy among so many others?

  He dug into his pack and unbuttoned the secret pocket there. The hide scroll was slipped snugly into the lining of the bag, so that it might easily be overlooked. He drew it out and laid it in front of him.

  Silence settled over the villagers when they saw the scroll. Even the youngest child knew they were looking upon a thing of power and danger. Only the newborn continued to cry from within the ger.

  The code on the scroll, which had taken months for him to master in the semi
nary, was now like a mother tongue to him. The symbols on the hide aligned with the eternal landmarks in the sky above, showing him the way.

  He adjusted his position several times, making notches in the circle to guide himself through the precise movements that were required. The night was cold and his hands shook, but eventually he was finished. He was now facing, to within one-hundredth of a degree, toward Saint Mirabina’s barrow.

  He stood, arms outstretched like a scarecrow, leaning into the wind. He mouthed the words: O holy Saint Mirabina, patron of the forlorn, grant that your grace may enter into me!

  And the plain lurched away beneath him.

  As always, there was a moment when their minds formed a bridge and he found himself inside her body. He looked through her eyes into the blackness of the tomb; he smelled the musk of old stone and moisture; he felt the cloth bindings biting into her skin. He felt her pain.

  Two nails through her hands, one through her feet; and on her chest the weight of centuries.

  Then the vision was gone, and instead she was moving into him. He stepped back from the window of his mind and saw things only from afar. His body was a distant object, moving with a volition that was not his own. Saint Mirabina had taken him over.

  The same old feeling spilled through him, like the warmth of a fire, like sunlight pouring through a half-open door. He saw the world as she saw it: the marvelous symphony of the heavens, the divine mystery of the earth. Fear faded away. Death faded away. There was no past or future, only the eternal stillness that was God.

  She smiled.

  As soon as she lowered her arms, the people knew who she was. They could tell by the way she moved, by the softness in her eyes, by her smile; the man’s body was just a shallow skin that she wore. No one could mistake her for anything other than a saint.

  She moved among the tribespeople and spoke to them, each as individuals. The things she said were no grand statements of theology, only simple words, but they were just what each person needed to hear. She drew on the memories in the priest’s mind, acting upon things that he had noticed or suspected. To some she offered words of comfort, to others words of warning. For many, a firm squeeze of their hand was all that was needed.

  Last of all she came to the one-eyed girl and embraced her.

  “Do not be afraid,” she whispered. “The faith shall always endure.”

  Then she left the crowd and went into the ger. The mother was curled up under dark furs with her new child at her breast. But it cried and would not suckle.

  The saint came close to her. Calmly she laid a hand on the baby’s head.

  “Let God smile upon this child,” she said.

  The babe continued to cry. The mother’s face shifted between a hesitant smile and a frown.

  “You thought she would be quiet when I gave her my blessing?” said the saint.

  Bashfully, the young woman nodded.

  “But that is her way. The rain falls, the grass grows, the wave breaks, the baby cries. You cannot tell any of them to be other than what they are.”

  The mother nodded. Then Saint Mirabina rose and stepped out of the ger, leaving her grace behind her like a charm.

  She looked toward the northwest. The moon was big and bright above the vacant steppe.

  “I must go,” she said. “This body cannot take much more strain.”

  The villagers pleaded with her but to no avail. She stepped out of the priest’s body and he became himself again, tired and worn as an old cloth.

  “You must stay now until morning,” the elders told him.

  He shook his head. He was deeply wearied by the ritual, but he knew he had to go on. He had feared for some time that the inquisitors had some way of tracking him whenever he called on Mirabina.

  It was all he could manage to climb onto the horse behind the one-eyed girl and hold on tight. He faded in and out of awareness as they rode across the starlit steppe, sometimes almost dreaming of the saint.

  Long ago he had been strong. He had been able to hold the saint’s essence for hours at a time. His faith had had other saints in those days: Theodore and Batuphon and Peter of Huxa. All gone now, all found and burned by the inquisitors.

  In those days he had been one of dozens of priests and priestesses. They had shared the saints between them; the lower half of his scroll was a lunar calendar that dictated the days and times that he could summon a particular saint. He did not heed it any more, but occasionally when he called Mirabina she would not answer. Each time it happened was like a silent signal: that someone else, somewhere out there, was calling on her as well.

  * * *

  The next day, the mountains could be seen in the distance. By nightfall they filled half the sky. The plain gave way to hills with a light scattering of trees. The priest and the one-eyed girl slept a few hours and went on. At daybreak she raised her arm and pointed northwest, to a tangle of smoke trails rising from the hills.

  “There is the road,” she said. “It is close now.”

  An hour later they arrived at Kou. The village had grown since the last time he had come: a dozen new huts had sprung up on the ridges above the town center. Despite his warnings, there were always those who wanted to live closer to the saint and who saw the village itself as a sacred site. Yet most of the faces that greeted him were still familiar: women he had counseled on their marriages, men he had dissuaded from folk-magic, and many children whose births he had blessed. As he dismounted from his horse, the people reached out to touch his hands or the hem of his cloak. An old woman wept silently, the tears following deep furrows down her cheeks.

  He was used to the love that they showed him here. He knew it was not truly him they loved but the saint; he could not be jealous, for he loved her also.

  The one-eyed girl’s family was waiting to welcome her home. She left him outside the headman’s house, where he was given a bed in a quiet room at the back. He fell asleep at once, but the feeling of urgency stayed with him, and he woke again after only a few hours.

  The headman and his family were waiting in the common room. They served him with anxious solicitousness, offering him the choicest cuts from a fresh-killed goat. They would not hurry him, no matter how much they wished to. Part of him wanted to sit and enjoy their hospitality as long as he could, but he knew that time was short, so he ate quickly and then said: “Take me to see the road.”

  If they had been allowed, the whole village would have gladly accompanied him. Instead the headman limited it to a select few whom he considered the ‘most pious’, the one-eyed girl among them.

  The trail wound up through the stony foothills of Mount Damash. The country was wide and almost treeless, save for the narrow defiles where water ran down from the mountains. After an hour they came to the crest of a hill that was marked with a cairn of stones. This was the threshold of the sacred; to go into the valley beyond was forbidden to all but the priests.

  From the summit, they could see the unfinished road. It stretched back across the steppe all the way to the western horizon. Dozens of campfires burned at its head, and men and beasts moved back and forth in the haze. They were workers from the west, brought in at great expense to push the road forward. It would curve north from here, crossing over the mountains to connect the Eastern Capital to the Empire’s most far-flung tributaries. It was the largest thing that had ever come to this part of the world.

  “They bring the road here to destroy her,” said the one-eyed girl.

  No, he thought—if they knew where Mirabina was they would already have burned her. But he did not correct the girl. Her people had a simpler way of looking at the world. They saw a purpose behind everything, whether for good or evil. To them the Empire was a vast demon crouched beyond the horizon, a singular entity of bottomless malice.

  From here the saint’s barrow was not quite visible, though the priest knew precisely where it was—down in the sacred valley, hidden behind a screen of birches and poplars. The curve of the road would lead inevitabl
y through the valley on its way up to the pass. The workers would be collecting firewood, hunting wild fowl, scouting the terrain for dangers. And if by God’s grace they did not find it, then before long there would be many travelers on this road, merchants passing along the newest of the Empire’s arteries. Sooner or later, someone would stumble upon the tomb.

  He turned to look at the hill-folk assembled behind him. They were all watching him in expectation. Their faces were solemn but with joyous smiles lurking beneath the surface. He realized they were waiting for him to perform a miracle; to turn the road aside just like Saint Omon had turned aside the floodwaters. He had never shown them any such power before, but they believed wholeheartedly that he could do it, for the alternative was unthinkable. It would make sense, up here on this windswept hilltop, at the hour of most desperate need; the whole scene was like something out of one of the lives of the saints. But he was no saint, only an old man of corrupted faith. He had nothing for them.

  At last he said: “I see.” And then: “Let us return to the village. I must call on the saint.”

  The hill folk’s rituals were different to those of the steppe herders yet fundamentally the same. Instead of purifying smoke they had a bowl of oil and balsam that the elders painted on each supplicant’s forehead. There was no need for the star map this time. Here they had a line of sunken stones that pointed the way precisely to the saint’s barrow. All the priest had to do was kneel along that line and call her into him.

  When she had come and gone, the villagers were left even more confident that danger would be averted, though she had said nothing to them other than a few vague words of comfort.

  “Do not be afraid,” the priest told them. “The saint has revealed to me what must be done. Go to your rest now, for I must pray.” None of them questioned him.

  He followed the stone line up to the ridge that overlooked the village. He knelt there for a long time as the sky turned from blue to black. At first he was only waiting for the villagers to go to sleep. Then, as the night grew quiet, he began to pray in earnest. It had been a long time, he realized, since he had prayed to her; not summoning her into his body but simply kneeling and asking her for help.